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an enormous amount of conflict. Given men’s desire for a greater number of sexual partners and a social system built around marriage and monogamy, you would expect a fair amount of infidelity, and that’s exactly what we do find. David Buss, a leading researcher of evolutionary psychology, has estimated that 30-50 percent of American men have at least one affair over the course of their marriage. Even worse, it does not appear that the state of a man’s marriage has much to do with whether or not he is unfaithful. According to a survey, 56 percent of men involved in an affair still described their marriage as “very happy,” which is probably the most distressing marital statistic I have ever come across. Before women storm off in a huff and decide to foreswear men altogether, though, they should know that they lag only slightly behind men. Buss estimates that 20- 40 percent of American women will also have one affair during their marriage. Another researcher has estimated that the chances of at least one partner being unfaithful may be as high as 76 percent! As you can see, the estimates for the actual amount of adultery vary widely. Apparently, we not only like to cheat on one another, we also like to cheat on studies about adultery.

Women’s affairs do differ from men’s. According to another survey, most women who had affairs said that they were “very unhappy” in their marriages. Women were also much more likely to form emotional commitments. While 44 percent of the men in one study claimed that they had little or no emotional involvement with their affair partner, only 11 percent of women felt no emotional investment.

These affairs are not simply matters of the bedroom but matters of the birthing room as well. Using a number of studies, scientists have estimated that roughly 10 percent of children are not fathered by their legal father. For obvious reasons, this question has not been studied in any systematic way, and other studies have produced numbers ranging from 5-30 percent. All of this has led one researcher to claim that adultery has been grossly underemphasized as a factor in human evolution.

Of course, when compared to the animal kingdom, we aren’t doing too badly because studies have revealed that even in the wild there is a great deal more cheating going on than anyone had imagined. Very few mammals are monogamous. One type of ape, the gibbon, was thought to be monogamous, but once scientists developed DNA testing, they found that gibbons also cheated on their partners. Many bird species form couples, which were once held up for admiration as exemplars of lifelong monogamy, but further research has shot down that heartwarming story. After using DNA testing for the birds, researchers discovered that roughly 30 percent of the offspring were not sired by the ostensible “father.” In some bird species, the number of offspring who were not sired by the “lifelong partner” reached as high as 76 percent. Even birds apparently covet thy neighbor’s wife. Scientists now believe that monogamy among birds is not due to any sort of romantic bond but is the result of the male’s attempt (often futile) to protect his paternity rights by guarding the female.

These paternity numbers came as a shock to most researchers. Although scientists have long thought that males are eager to spread their seed, they assumed that the role of the female was almost entirely passive. One researcher even claimed that copulation was “essentially a service or favor that women render to men.” The fact that females (including women) were also promiscuous came as a major revelation (that this was a revelation says a great deal about the power of our cultural biases to shape our thinking). We know why men are interested in multiplying sexual partners. Think back to the sperm and the egg. Sperm is cheap, and sleeping around increases the chances that the man can pass along his genes. But why are women also sleeping around? The egg is the precious resource, and the number of children a woman can produce is relatively small.

Ah, but the woman